What the exam asks
When you use Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry in your assessments, examiners reward how precisely you connect small-scale language choices to the overarching design of the work:
- Paper 2 (Comparative essay, 25 marks): You write closed-book on two literary works. For a poetry collection, top-band responses under Criterion A (Knowledge, understanding and interpretation) and Criterion B1 (Analysis and evaluation of textual features and/or authorial choices) usually discuss two or three poems to represent the whole work, using ‘Mrs Midas’ alongside poems like ‘Medusa’ or ‘Havisham’. Under Criterion B2 (Comparative analysis), you compare how Duffy and another writer use voice, structure, or objects to explore human relationships or power.
- Individual oral (40 marks): Because ‘Mrs Midas’ is 66 lines long, you must select a continuous extract of no more than 40 lines (such as stanzas 1–6 or stanzas 6–11, 36 lines each; seven stanzas would be 42 lines, over the limit) and link it to the rest of the poem and wider collection around a focused global issue.
- HL essay (20 marks): You can build a 1,200–1,500-word line of inquiry across several of Duffy’s dramatic monologues, examining how she subverts inherited myths or uses domestic space.
Core ideas
Myth retold from the domestic margin
In Book XI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Phrygian king Midas is granted his wish by Bacchus that everything he touches turn to gold, before repenting when he cannot eat or drink. Ovid mentions no wife. Duffy invents Mrs Midas as a practical, contemporary suburban woman whose marriage is destroyed by her husband’s greed: a wish he made without asking her. By placing an ancient myth inside a modern kitchen with a stove, a phone, and a cat, Duffy measures a husband’s hubris (arrogant pride that invites a fall) against the everyday survival of a household.
Form and narrative arc: the eleven sestets
The poem is structured into eleven unrhymed six-line stanzas (sestets)—66 lines in total. This steady, uniform visual container acts as a counterweight to the surreal chaos of the plot:
| Stanzas | Narrative stage | Tonal shift |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Domestic calm at dusk; Midas snaps a twig and transforms a pear in the garden. | Relaxed, warm, amused disbelief. |
| 3–4 | Gold enters the house; doorknobs, corn on the cob and the wine glass turn to metal, and he sits like a king. | Escalating tension, awe, and physical dread. |
| 5–6 | Mrs Midas screams, locks away the cat, lectures the listener on gold’s uselessness. | Practical panic and sharp, sardonic anger. |
| 7–8 | Separation inside the house; the chair against the bedroom door and the dream of a golden child. | Claustrophobia, fear of petrification, maternal grief. |
| 9–10 | Banishment to a caravan in the woods; golden dead animals and the music of Pan. | Detached contempt and finality. |
| 11 | Aftermath; living alone, caught off guard by golden light and a bowl of apples, aching for his warm skin. | Quiet, devastating elegy and sensual loss. |
Literalised idioms and catalogues
Because Midas’s wish turns metaphor into cold metal, Duffy fills the monologue with literalised idioms and puns. Phrases we use casually—a “heart of gold”, “fast food”, “the last straw”—become horrific physical realities, and new puns such as “the teeth of the rich” (gold teeth; corn kernels turned to metal) grow out of the same joke. Alongside these, escalating catalogues track objects hardening in real time, turning the ordinary home into a sterile museum.